Review: 'The Play That Goes Wrong' wreaks havoc at the Fox Cities PAC

"The Play That Goes Wrong" runs April 30-May 5 at the Fox Cities Performing Arts Center in downtown Appleton.(Photo: Jeremy Daniel)

APPLETON - Anyone who has ever been involved with theater knows that sinking feeling you get when something goes terribly wrong on stage. A line is forgotten. A prop goes missing. A set piece falls apart.

You try your best to fudge your way through the mishap without the audience noticing, all while your stomach plummets straight into your shoes.

“The Play That Goes Wrong,” which opened Tuesday night at the Fox Cities Performing Arts Center, is full of those exact type of moments. But rest assured that these blunders are intentional, and wildly hilarious to boot.

The show is actually a play within a play (take note that the spoofy Playbill itself is worth a read), in which the Cornley University Drama Society is trying their hardest to pull off a production of a 1920s murder mystery.

As you can guess from the name of the show, despite the cast’s best intentions, everything goes absolutely haywire. While the result is nothing short of pure chaos, the dedicated ensemble grits their teeth and white-knuckles the performance. They’re determined to make it through to the shocking conclusion — regardless of how many unconscious cast members and dismantled sets lay in their wake.

The show is nonstop humor, most aptly described as a combination of the nonsensical and sometimes irreverent approach of Monty Python and the classic slapstick style of the Three Stooges.

The writing is witty and clever, and the staging is flawless. After all, as counter-intuitive as it might seem, it’s tough to pull off that level of pandemonium without being meticulously choreographed. Similarly the scenery seems unassuming enough at first glance. But as mayhem mounts, you gain a true appreciation for the intricacies of the set design.

However it’s really the small but mighty cast of only eight characters that makes this show laugh-out-loud funny. Their comedic timing and chemistry is impeccable, making their ridiculous antics all the more endearing. From their entertaining interactions with the audience ahead of the show to their over-the-top “acting” styles, their dynamic often resembles that of a well-oiled comedy troupe — evidenced by the fact that the theater was filled with side-splitting laughter throughout the entirety of the performance.

It’s not often that you go to the theater and find yourself hoping that things fall apart. But this performance of “The Play That Goes Wrong” was the first show to actually make me look forward to whatever onstage disaster was coming up next, because each one was even more uproarious than the last.

Yes, this show is all about what happens when the unthinkable happens — when everything that could run off the rails during a live theatrical performance actually does. But as it turns out, everything going wrong has a surprisingly delightful result: a performance that’s oh-so-right.